NJL: “Predictions for Journalism 2012 – To close out 2011, we asked some of the smartest people we know to predict what 2012 will bring for the future of journalism.”

NJL, Carrie Brown-Smith: “The social media bubble may burst, and more predictions for 2012 – In 2012 we will see a growing gap between newsrooms that are innovating and those that are…not. – 2011 saw a number of promising examples news organizations going beyond ‘digital first’ platitudes to actually trying things and making it work, and I’m optimistic we will see this trend continue. … 2012 will be a good year for local television. … 2012 *might* see a bursting of the social media bubble, or at least convince us that it is harder game to play than we thought. – This might seem odd coming from an avid social media user who developed two new courses on it for our journalism department and who even has been christened with that dreaded ‘social media guru’ title on more than one occasion [ack]. And assuredly, I do think social media is an incredibly important tool for news organizations to use to promote their content, improve their reporting, and engage their audiences… Journalism schools will increasingly step up to the plate to play a leadership role in journalism innovation in 2012.”

NJL, Dave Winer: “We need to improve tech criticism. Here’s how. – At the end of this year I’m thinking about the need for proper criticism of software, alongside other arts like theater, movies, music, books, travel, food and architecture. It’s finally time to stop being all gee whiz about this stuff. Tech is woven into the fabric of our culture, as much as or more so than the other arts. And it’s headed toward being even more interwoven. – We all need this, on all sides of the art. As users and creators. … The goal would be to move away from the lone inventor myth and see tech projects as more like film production or a even more apt, a TV series. Software is a process.”

NJL, Nicholas Carr: “2012 will bring the appification of media – For years now, the line between the software business and the media business has been blurring. Software applications used to take the form of packaged goods, sold through retail outlets at set prices. Today, as a result of cloud computing and other advances, applications look more and more like media products. … As traditional media companies have moved to distribute their wares in digital form – as code, in other words – they’ve come to resemble software companies. … The old general-purpose web, where everyone visited the same sites and saw the same stuff, is rapidly being supplanted by specialized packages of digital content geared to particular devices – iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Kindle, Nook, Xbox – or to particular members-only sites like Facebook and Google+. … Apps are as much content-delivery services as they are conventional software programs. Newspapers, magazines, books, games, music albums, TV shows: All are being reimagined as apps. Appified, if you will. – Appification promises to be the major force reshaping media in general and news media in particular during 2012. … Appification opens to newspapers the powerful marketing and pricing strategy that the Berkeley economist (and now Google executive) Hal Varian dubs ‘versioning.’ Long a cornerstone of the software business, versioning is the practice of creating many versions of the same underlying informational product, packaging them in different ways, and selling them at different prices to different sets of customers. … We already see versioning strategies at work in the ‘metered’ programs operated by a growing number of papers… The orthodox view among online pundits has been that paywalls and subscription fees won’t work for general-interest newspapers, that people simply won’t pay for a bundle of news online. … That won’t mean the end of the industry’s struggles, but it does portend a brighter future. And that’s good news.“

NJL, Robert Hernandez: “For journalism’s future, the killer app is credibility – We know that Content is King. There is no doubting this concept. If you don’t have ‘it,’ no one is going to engage with you. We know that Distribution is Queen. In this modern age, what’s the point of having ‘it’ if no one will find it? My prediction is that this ruling monarchy will be augmented by… a prince. Perhaps a duke? Whatever. And it’s called Credibility. … We want to trust journalism. And to do so, we need to trust journalists. – And bypassing the blogger-vs-tweeter-vs-media company-vs-journalist debate, it is going to come down to one thing: Credibility. – Can I reliably trust you to tell me what is going on? If the answer is yes, then I don’t care if you work out of a newsroom or out of your garage.”

NJL, Dan Gillmor: “2012 will be the year of the content-controller oligopoly – Journalists will start paying serious attention to an issue that will ultimately determine whether they can participate in the digital world: control. – We are moving rapidly from an era of an oligopoly of content providers to an oligopoly of content controllers: new choke points. … This consolidation, to a very few companies plus increasing government intervention, is even more dangerous – and information providers of all kinds are finally starting to grasp what’s happening. … Search engines… wire-line Internet service providers… mobile carriers… Apple… the copyright cartel… government: The forces of control are getting more powerful every day. They are a direct threat to journalism and innovation. Journalists are starting to take note – and we can only hope it’s not too late.”

NJL, Martin Langeveld: “A look back at my 2011 predictions, along with a fresh batch for 2012 – The Eurozone crisis gives way to the dollarzone crisis as Congress continues to deadlock over budget and debt issues. The Dow falters, dropping 10% by mid-year. The prospect of a President Gingrich lifts hopes briefly, but when Obama is re-elected while Republicans retain the House and retake the Senate, it sinks another 5%. Newspaper stocks fail to beat the market, but all the digital giants (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, AOL and Apple) are all in positive territory well ahead of the Dow.“

NJL, Amy Webb: “Big data, mobile payments, and identity authentication will be big in 2012 – When Google launched its new social network Plus, it made headlines for requiring users to create accounts with their real names and identities. At the time, Google argued that people behave better when they use their real names – it even went so far as to call Plus not a social network, but a digital identity service. Some are now questioning how and when Google would be using our digital identities. Outside of social media, police departments in the U.S. have started using MORIS, which snaps on to an iPhone and enables officers to scan the irises of alleged criminals. In Brazil, police offers are starting to fit glasses with biometric cameras which can scan 46,000 data points on a face and query a criminal database in real-time. Siri, an application acquired by Apple for the iPhone, can recognize individual voices and infer contextual information based on the user. In 2012, our fingerprints may not matter nearly as much as our eyes, faces, and usernames.”

NJL, Gina Masullo Chen: “Next year, personalization platforms will bring us more choices, not fewer – News has always been about making choices among lots of information; technology just helps us make those choices more smartly. … If I were creating this future, a large component of it would include offering greater customization of news and information for readers. … People choose what they like, what interests them, what gratifies their own needs, and what fits how they see the world. – In 2012, technology may help them make those choices more quickly and easily.”

NJL, Tim Carmody: “Next year, Kindles, iPhones, and tablets will truly grow up – In consumer technology, five year cycles are really interesting. … Why does this matter for 2012? Well, besides five years of iPhone, we’re also looking at five years of Kindle. That’s two five-year anniversaries that really signal the point when mobile reading became mainstream. You could also call it the five-year anniversary of the tablet as a media device, because really, that’s what the Kindle is, form factor-wise. … With e-readers, in general, I don’t think we’ve really figured out how touchscreen reading devices are supposed to work, how to blend what we’ve learned from tablets with what we’ve learned from e-readers. … If I could make an analogy, 2011 for reading devices was like the first color/video iPod. 2012 will be the iPhone year. It seems like we made big leaps forward only because we don’t actually know what the real leap forward looks like yet.”

NJL, Burt Herman: “In the coming year, social media journalists will #Occupythenews – Social media’s essential role in serious journalism can no longer be ignored. Next year, social media journalism will finally grow up. – Journalism will be more collaborative, embracing the fundamental social nature of the Internet. The story will be shaped by people involved in the news, curated by savvy editors from diverse sources and circulated back again to the audience. This is the new real-time news cycle. … Journalists have always taken masses of information and condensed it into something digestible for readers, adding context and insights. More than ever, journalists will curate sources outside their newsrooms to tell their stories. … It’s up to the new generation of social media journalists to #Occupythenews – and to make sure society doesn’t miss the stories that, diffuse and elusive though they may be, are crucial to understanding our world.”

NJL, Rex Sorgatz: “LA is the future (kill me now) – Let’s get this out of the way: I hate LA. – I hate LA the way that any good New Yorker hates LA, with a passion bordering on paranoid psychosis. I hate the faux culture, I hate the vapid people, I hate the unctuous politics. … But I am here to preach a new sermon: LA is the Future. It pains me to say, but it’s time we all sucked up the fresh sludge spewing from the organic juice pumper. … Let’s start here: Right now, I pay over $200 per month to have 1,600 TV channels pumped into my apartment. How many of those channels do I watch? A dozen, max. – This is clearly broken. Really broken. Stupid broken. – And we all know this has to end, somehow. And we all know it will end, somehow. … But I think we can all agree that this broken system is going to be fixed, somehow. – And when that happens, the fallout for the LA-based television industry will be catastrophic. … When the collapse hits, capital will rush out of the traditional entertainment industry faster than you can say ‘Lehman Brothers.’ … It will be fun, it will be exciting. And I might even hate LA a little less.”

NJL, Vadim Lavrusik: “Curation and amplification will become much more sophisticated in 2012 – A big question for the coming year: How will the right communities get the right kind of news? – Ladies and gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to build a sustainable journalism model. Better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster. … For the last year, much of the focus has been on curating content from the social web and effectively contextualizing disparate pieces of information to form singular stories. … Because anyone can publish content today and report information from a breaking news event, the role journalists can play in amplifying – and verifying – that content becomes ever more important. … Curation itself will continue to evolve and become more sophisticated. … The coming year will see a more balanced approach. … Information will, in this environment, inevitably reach the citizenry; at stake is the quality of the information that does the reaching. If content is king, distribution is queen.”

NJL, Steve Buttry: “From a dropped paywall to a social media Pulitzer, expect a year of transformation – We will see more newspaper-company transactions in 2012. … [P]eople with sufficient wealth appear to have bought the companies outright, taking on little or no debt. … The winner of the 2012 presidential election will work harder on reaching voters through social media than through the professional media. …Digital First Media will continue to lead the way in transforming the digital news business. … We will see some major realignment of journalism and news-industry organizations.”

NJL, Paul Bradshaw: “Collaboration! Data! 2012 will see news outlets turning talk into action – 1. 2012 will be the year we finally move away from the traditional homepage – The ‘stream’ as an interface will move from being the preserve of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to being a serious consideration for news website homepages. We’re all 24-hour news channels now. 2. In 2012, ‘Collaboration Is King’… 3. News organizations turn talk into action on data – Any news organization that is serious about its fourth estate role is building the skills to interrogate those datasets.”

NJL, Dan Kennedy: “2012 will bring ‘the great retrenchment’ among newspaper publishers – Paywalls may become more popular in 2012; that doesn’t mean they’ll be enough to save a flailing industry. … The great newspaper retrenchment may prove to be more than a dead-cat bounce. As the economy slowly improves, the newspaper business may well enjoy a semi-revival. But before long, the forces that have been undermining newspapers since the rise of the commercial web in the mid-1990s will come back to the fore. … For the most part, though, you can be reasonably sure that newspaper companies will continue to cut costs, maximize profits (or minimize losses), and do their best ostrich imitations until they find themselves under siege once again. – They’re standing up for traditional values – and what could be more traditional than failing to plan for the future?”

NJL, Emily Bell: “2012 will be a year of expanded ‘network sensibility’ – Making predictions about journalism is a hopeless business: Jay Rosen, who is much wiser than I am, said he never does it, and I salute him for that. … The network sensibility will grow in newsrooms that currently don’t tend to have it as part of their process – it is still seen in the vast majority of places as more of a ‘nice to have’ rather than a ‘must have.’ … While this use of distributed tools and new platforms continues at speed, I think we will also see some much-needed closer scrutiny on what this new reality means for journalism and its constant redefinition of products and services. … Journalists have always been very skilled at stories and projects and fairly awful at thinking about platforms. We need more engineers who want to be journalists, and we need to teach students more about the implications of publishing in a digital environment – whatever the format their journalism originally takes.”

The state of the U.S. news media improved in 2010, at least in comparison with a dismal 2009. Newspapers were the only major media sector to see continued ad revenue declines, down 6.4%. (After our report was published, the Newspaper Association of America released its final tally and put the drop at 6.3%.) But as online news consumption continues to grow – it surpassed print newspapers in ad revenue and audience for the first time in 2010 – a more fundamental challenge to journalism also became clearer. The news industry in the digital realm is no longer in control of its own future, according to the State of the News Media report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.

Online, news organizations increasingly depend on: independent networks to sell their ads, on aggregators and social networks to deliver a substantial portion of their audience, and now, as news consumption becomes more mobile, on device makers (such as Apple) and software developers (Google) to distribute their content. And the new players take a share of the revenue and in many cases, also control the audience data.

“In a world where consumers decide what news they want and how they want to get it, the future belongs to those who understand the audience best, and who can leverage that knowledge with advertisers,” said PEJ Director Tom Rosenstiel. “Increasingly that knowledge exists outside of news companies.”

These are some of the conclusions in the eighth annual State of the News Media report, which takes a comprehensive look at the health and status of the American news media: This year’s study includes detailed looks at the eight major sectors of media. The special reports this year include a survey about the role of mobile technology in news consumption and the willingness of people to pay for their local newspaper online, a look at emerging economic models in community news and a study of how the U.S. newspaper business is faring compared with other nations.

The Who Owns the News Media database allows users to compare companies by various indicators, explore each media sector and read profiles of individual companies. And in the Year in the News Interactive, users can explore PEJ’s comprehensive content analysis of media performance based on 52,613 stories from 2010.

Among the study’s key findings:

Mobile has already become an important factor in news: Nearly half of all Americans (47%) now get some form of local news on a mobile device, according to a new survey in this year’s report, produced by PEJ with Pew Internet and American Life Project in partnership with the Knight Foundation. As of January 2011, 7% of Americans reported owning some kind of electronic tablet, nearly double the number four months earlier. But the movement to mobile doesn’t guarantee a revenue source. To date, even among early adaptors, only 10% of those who have downloaded local news apps paid for them.

Online outpaces newspapers: Fully 46% of people now say they get news online at least three times a week, surpassing newspapers (40%) for the first time. Only local TV news is a more popular platform in America now (50%). In another milestone, more money was spent on online advertising than on newspaper advertising in 2010: Online advertising overall grew 13.9% to $25.8 billion in 2010, according to data from eMarketer. While eMarketer does not offer a print ad revenue figure, we estimate the newspaper took in $22.8 billion in print ad revenue in 2010. (We estimate online ad revenue at newspapers to be about $3 billion.)

Online news hires may have matched newspaper cuts for the first time: Large national online-only news operations began to get into the creation of original reporting in a significant way in 2010. AOL hired nearly 1,000 employees, over half of whom went to the new local news venture Patch.com. Bloomberg Government expects to number 150 journalists and analysts by the end of 2011, doubling Bloomberg’s Washington bureau and Yahoo added several dozen reporters across news, sports and finance. These hiring increases appeared to have compensated for the 1,000 to 1,500 job losses the study estimates the newspaper industry suffered in 2010.

More grim news for newspapers: The newspaper sector endured another year of revenue and audience declines. Advertising revenues fell by roughly 6.4% in 2010 from the year before. Weekday circulation fell 5% and Sunday fell 4.5%. Seven of the top 25 newspapers in the United States are now owned by hedge funds, which had virtually no role in the industry a few years ago. Many of these new owners are turning to other outsiders to turn the business around. One potential silver lining is the finding that 23% of Americans said they would pay $5 a month for an online version of their local paper if the print version were to perish.

Every media sector is losing audience now except online: For the first time in at least a dozen years, the median audience declined at all three cable news channels. CNN suffered most with median prime-time viewership, falling 37% in 2010; Fox lost 11%, and MSNBC 5%. In aggregate, the median viewership fell 13.7% across the entire day in 2010. Prime-time median viewership fell even more, 16% to an average of 3.2 million, according to PEJ’s original analysis of Nielsen Market Research data. Daytime fell 12%.

Local TV wins 2010 revenue race: Among traditional media, local TV may have had the best year financially. Revenue rose 17%, exceeding projections, thanks in part to a 77% increase in auto advertising and a record $2.2 billion in political advertising for the midterm elections. And, to boost audience, local TV has added newscasts at 4:30 AM in 69 cities; more than double the startups in that time slot a year ago. Nonetheless, when adjusted for inflation, average station revenue has still dropped by almost half in the past nine years.

AM FM radio listening may be on the brink of a major change – and decline: Radio has remained among the most stable media platforms, largely because AM and FM remained the primary listening format in automobiles. That may be about to change. Toyota is about to put online radio in all its models and Pandora has made an agreement with Pioneer that would include its online radio service in the cars of at least six additional auto manufacturers by the end of 2011. Meanwhile, Audio’s foray into HD radio seems to be failing. Only 31% of Americans have even heard of it and the number of stations converting to HD dropped substantially in 2010.

The report is the work of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, a nonpolitical, nonpartisan research institute: The study is funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and was produced with the help of a number of collaborators, including Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute, Deborah Potter of Newslab and a host of industry readers.

Well, there’s eInk, eReaders with different screen technologies, publication systems etc. pp. – Anyway, personally I do not believe in a recovery of “print”. At least not in developed countries. Print’s got a hype around the world, but not where electronic devices have taken over…

Newsweek: “Newsweek magazine and The Daily Beast, an operating company of IAC, announced today they have agreed to merge their operations in a joint venture to be owned equally by Sidney Harman and IAC. – The new entity will be called The Newsweek Daily Beast Company. The directors of the joint venture will include Dr. Harman as Executive Chairman, IAC Chairman Barry Diller, and one director each to be appointed from either side. … ‘I see Newsweek and the Beast as a marriage between Newsweek’s journalistic depth and the vibrant versatility The Daily Beast has realized on the web,’ said Ms. Brown. ‘The metabolism of The Daily Beast will help power the resurgence of Newsweek and Newsweek amplifies the range of talent and audience The Daily Beast can reach. The two entities together offer writers, photographers and marketers a powerful dual platform.‘ … ‘Consumers and advertisers value media distributed across multiple platforms,’ said Mr. Colvin. ‘The merger of The Daily Beast and Newsweek audiences creates a powerful global media property for the digital age.‘”

Brown, TDB: “Some weddings take longer to plan than others. The union of The Daily Beast and Newsweek magazine finally took place with a coffee-mug toast between all parties Tuesday evening, in a conference room atop Beast headquarters, the IAC building on Manhattan’s West 18th Street. The final details were only hammered out last night. – What does this exciting new media marriage mean? It means that The Daily Beast’s animal high spirits will now be teamed with a legendary, weekly print magazine in a joint venture, named The Newsweek Daily Beast Company, owned equally by Barry Diller’s IAC and Sidney Harman, owner (and savior) of Newsweek. … It takes two inspired entrepreneurs like Barry Diller and Sidney Harman to undertake such a challenging media experiment. … Both of us look forward to joining with Sidney Harman, who made his fortune and reputation as founder of Harman International, the worldwide audio manufacturer, and has a mind that’s alive with a cultural curiosity that’s exactly what you need to succeed in the publishing world. I very much admire his passion to restore Newsweek to its glory days, and with a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, we will. Join us for the journey!”

Guardian: “Merger talks reportedly broke down in late October because Sidney Harman, who bought Newsweek in August for $1, balked at terms that denied him the power to dismiss Brown while giving the British editor freedom to report to an independent board.”

NYT: “The arrangement is in many ways a win-win for both sides, with Mr. Harman getting a respected editor who will generate buzz around a magazine that many in the publishing world had left for dead, and Ms. Brown gaining an editing job back in a well-known publication. – It also gives Mr. Diller, a member of the board of The Washington Post Company, the longtime former owner of Newsweek, a print magazine. That has the potential for far more revenue than The Daily Beast, a digital news and aggregation enterprise that has been neither fish nor fowl.”

NYT: “People who have spoken with and consulted Mr. Diller on the Newsweek talks said that over the course of the discussions with Sidney Harman, the magazine’s new owner, Mr. Diller became increasingly enamored with the idea of idea of coupling his two-year-old start-up with one of the most established brands in print journalism. … The merger is likely to come with other forms of consolidation. One of the main reasons the merger appealed to Mr. Diller and Mr. Harman was that combining the newsrooms and business sides would allow them to reduce staffing. When asked about possible job cuts on Friday, Ms. Brown said, ‘We’re going to have to look at the whole business model, the whole editorial model, and we’ll have to make our assessments.‘”

AdAge: “It remains to be seen how the marriage works once the honeymoon is over. Back when the deal seemed dead, Ms. Brown seemed to think that walking away was the best idea. The ‘complexities’ of Newsweek’s ‘infrastructure, legacy and our desire to stay nimble ultimately made this not the right decision at this time,’ she said then in an email to The New York Times.”

pC: “One of the big questions as the two media outfits come together is whether they can both rein in costs or whether this will compound their respective cash flow problems. At the time of Harman’s purchase of Newsweek barely two months ago, the magazine was expected to lose another $20 million by the end of the year. Meanwhile, Daily Beast, which just celebrated its second anniversary in October, will lose about $10 million, according to the WSJ.”

TC: “Combining the two news brands would be a disaster. Just look at what each publication stands for. Newsweek is a storied publication whose tag line is, ‘What Matters Most.’ The Daily Beast’s, meanwhile, is. ‘Read This Skip That.’ … The plan seems to be to combine the newsrooms and the ad sales, but keep the properties independent. The magazine will be a place for longer narratives and investigative pieces. The web will be for breaking news. … IAC confirms the two sites will likely be combined under the Daily Beast. – Comscore estimates that the Daily Beast is pulling in 2.9 million unique visitors a month, while Newsweek.com is attracting 5.4 million. But those are two very different audiences looking for different things.”